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Google, IBM and Lyft launch open source microservices project

Google, IBM and Lyft have joined forces to launch an open source platform to give developers more control over microservices. Microservice architectures are a way to break down larger applications into a collection of smaller apps or processes that communicate over APIs.

The open project, named Istio, offers visibility and control over traffic without the need to make changes to application code, as well as providing tools for security and compliance requirements. It does this by integrating essentially different microservices into a single service mesh.

“As monolithic applications are decomposed into microservices, teams have to worry about the challenges inherent in integrating services in distributed systems: they must account for service discovery, load balancing, fault tolerance, end-to-end monitoring, dynamic routing for feature experimentation and, perhaps most important of all, compliance and security,” said Varun Talwar, product manager for Google’s cloud service platform, in a blog post.

The Istio team added: “Inconsistent attempts at solving these challenges, cobbled together from libraries, scripts and Stack Overflow snippets leads to solutions that vary wildly across languages and runtimes, have poor observability characteristics and can often end up compromising security.”

Istio has been built using Lyft’s Envoy proxy. It currently runs on Kubernetes platforms, however, the trio hope to add support for other environments, such as virtual machines and Cloud Foundry, in the coming months.